


Grave Goods

by gamerfic



Category: The Curse - Josh Ritter (Song)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Ancient Egypt, Angst, As you do, Complicated Relationships, Death Rituals, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Music, Mummies, Non-Linear Narrative, mummifying your girlfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24315604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/pseuds/gamerfic
Summary: An offering given by the king to Osiris, Lord of the West, Lord of Eternity, for the ka of Dr. Katherine Bishop, Senior Curator of Egyptology, True of Voice.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 8
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	Grave Goods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rhovanel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhovanel/gifts).



> Content notes: Themes of death, grief, and regret are fundamental elements of this story. The specifics of how ancient Egyptian mummies were created are also a recurring topic and inseparable from the core narrative, though the really gory aspects of the process are not described in explicit detail.

Nefermaat pulls over to the shoulder of the road. The Cadillac's tires crunch on the gravel as the police cruiser's red and blue lights fill the rearview mirror. This is another new experience for him, but based on what he's seen on television he thinks he knows what to do. He rolls down the window, then places his hands precisely at ten and two on the steering wheel. His lungs are in a canopic jar somewhere in some museum, but something in his chest still fills with air when he draws in a deep breath and lets it out. He sits as motionless as death as he hears the officer's footsteps approaching, doesn't flinch when the bright beam of her flashlight hits his eye. "License and registration - holy shit!"

He turns his head slowly toward her and stretches his dry lips to reveal yellow teeth lined up in a friendly smile. "What seems to be the problem, officer?" He thinks that's what you're supposed to say when the police stop you.

The officer appears to have forgotten her line. "Do you still need to see my documents?" he prompts her. He has a valid license in the glove compartment, though he's never been quite sure how the bureaucrats settled on the answers it gives for things like "address" and "date of birth." The car is probably registered in Katherine's name, which may or may not create a problem.

"Nah, you're good," the officer replies, slack-jawed. It's no surprise; his face, once an object of terror for so many, has gradually through time and exposure become one of the most famous in the world. She stares at him, her mind undoubtedly so crowded with the questions she's imagined asking him - _How were the pyramids built? Was Cleopatra really as beautiful as they say? Is the curse of the pharaohs real? Did you and Dr. Bishop ever, I mean were you, you know?_ \- that she's forgotten the one she's actually supposed to ask next.

"I don't know why you pulled me over," he continues, following a well-worn script.

"Right! Of course. Your lights are off."

"Oh my." Nefermaat fumbles at the steering column until he find the right switch. The headlights bathe the road ahead in white light. "I apologize. I wasn't thinking. I see better in the dark than the living do. Of course I would not want anyone to enter the Duat before their time."

There isn't much more he needs to say. The encounter concludes with an autograph and the usual awkward banter, and the officer waves affably at him as he merges back into traffic. She is so wrapped up in her brush with celebrity that now she doesn't know why she pulled him over either. It is for the best. If she had wanted to open the trunk and had found the canvas-wrapped body within, his fame would not have been enough to save him.

* * *

"How is it possible that they do not care what happens to them?"

"They _do_ care, just not in the same way. It depends on their faith, I suppose. I'm not explaining it well, but some people care very much." Katherine began to say something else, but the words melted away into a sigh. More than likely it had something to do with the nuances of modern religious belief, which Nefermaat wasn't particularly interested in anyway. Making fine distinctions between people foolish enough to think there was only one god was about as worthwhile as arguing over whether it was more correct to call a hippopotamus a lizard or a bird. "They just don't see it the way you do."

"What other way is there to see it?"

"Well...many people who believe they have a soul would say it's something separate from their body. To them, the two things don't really relate. They'd say that when we die, our souls go to a spirit realm where we don't need our bodies anymore. Think of a snake, shedding its skin as it grows. We treat corpses with respect and give them a proper burial, but it isn't the person anymore, not really. Funerals are for the living, not the dead."

Nefermaat laughed in disbelief. "I assure you, the dead would disagree. No one here knows how to sustain the ka of their ancestors? Or how to open their mouths for eternity?"

"Like I said, religion is different now. Most people have never heard of those things."

"But you know of them."

"Yes. I've also spent my entire adult life studying Egyptology. I'm not most people."

"I am grateful you are not," he said, and leaned over to kiss her. They had stopped to rest on a bench in the marine biology wing, sheltered beneath a life-size model of a blue whale in the twilight of the exit signs. She laid her head in his lap, and he began to smooth her hair away from her face. "The Nile floods. Ra's boat crosses the sky each day. Maat judges the dead and grants new life to those who are worthy. Even if no one believes these things will happen, it doesn't prevent them from being true."

"You sound very certain. I'm comfortable not knowing. But if I'm wrong, after I die I give you permission to say you told me so."

Nefermaat heard the laughter in her words, but he heard her carefully studied neutrality too. "Then what do you believe?"

"About souls? I genuinely don't think anyone can be sure, but...Science is the best tool we've found yet for understanding how the world works. And it hasn't turned up any evidence yet to convince me that my consciousness comes from anything outside my own brain. I don't expect there's anywhere out there for it to go."

His hand stopped its steady motion and cupped her cheek, dry fingertips pressed against warm supple skin. "You don't think you'll go to the Duat. Stand before Anubis and his judges. Become an akh and live again, if all goes according to plan."

"No. I assume I won't get another life after this one." Katherine's eyes were wide and trusting as she met his gaze. "So I intend to make the most of the time I have now."

Nefermaat trailed his fingers downward to rest his palm over her heart, to feel it hammering beneath her ribcage. His own heart accelerated to match its pace. He still didn't understand how or why he'd ended up here, or where his new life might be leading him. He only knew how fortunate he was to have been awakened by her. "I intend the same as you," he said, then let his hand slip lower to silence any further conversation.

* * *

Katherine's house is a one-and-a-half-story bungalow on a quiet, leafy street in a bedroom community - close enough to the university and the museum to make the commute reasonable, far enough away to allow for some separation between work and home, easily affordable on an assistant professor's salary. Later on, she made a much better living from the books she and Nefermaat wrote together and the speaking fees they commanded. Yet she remained in her modest, paid-off dwelling, knowing her travel and lecture schedule would keep her away from it for ten months out of the year anyway. She was always practical about those things.

Any mansion she owned would be just as empty now. Her heart stopped while she slept just days before - an unexpected death, but not so early in life as to make people use words like "tragic" or "a life cut short" to describe it. She leaves behind no spouse or partner, no children, no siblings. Her parents predeceased her long ago. He doesn't know who will inherit her wealth - some distant cousin, perhaps, or the universities and institutions that educated and trained her. The current ownership of her house is unclear, and he hopes it will remain so for some time to come. He only needs a few months to do what must be done. As he turns her key in the lock he directs a wordless supplication to Anubis: _Master of Secrets, guide my hand. Grant me enough time!_

The door squeals on its hinges as it opens. It's obvious Katherine hasn't stayed here for a long time. The refrigerator is empty, and even the scant cans of vegetables and boxes of pasta in the cabinets are fast approaching their expiration dates. In the master bedroom upstairs the bed lays stripped beneath the sloped ceiling, its quilt neatly folded at the foot of the bare mattress. A fine layer of dust covers everything, grey as a shroud. Nefermaat moves through each room with the desperate grace of a thief, afraid to disturb the fragile balance of the silent house as he plunders its memories. He wonders if she felt the same way when she first chiseled through the door of his tomb. Had his world been as much of a mystery to her then as hers still was to him?

But the bedrooms and the office and the kitchen don't really concern him except as a matter of curiosity. The basement, for his purposes, has everything he needs. The wooden stairs creak under his light footfalls as he descends. A single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling barely lights the room. The unfinished space is as vacant as the rest of the house, holding little more than an outdated washer and dryer and built-in shelves stacked high with cardboard storage boxes. It's nothing like the booth he had in Weset, but it will have to do.

In the shadows, along one wall, sits a disused workbench. Nefermaat sweeps the tools away and drags it to the center of the basement, over the drain set into the cement floor. By now it's the middle of the night, so he heads back upstairs to get Katherine out of the trunk before any of the neighbors see him doing it. He wishes he could have been here before, creating better memories than the ones he's about to be stuck with. _There is no other way,_ he reminds himself. _She said funerals were for the living, but she was wrong._ The task he is about to undertake is the last and most important gift he can give her. Someday soon, he believes, she'll be grateful for it.

* * *

Being away from home never used to bother Katherine. Her chosen career in academia required boundless willingness to relocate, to say nothing of her months-long expeditions excavating the Valley of the Kings. Rather than tie herself to one place, she learned to create a home for herself wherever she happened to be - a home that, for so many years, she invited Nefermaat into. She must have always known (or at least suspected) what she was risking by sharing herself with him, and what their love might cost her. She did it anyway.

Their first shared home was the ship that carried him to America. In those days, the waves he watched through the porthole were his only reminder of anything outside the musty confines of the cargo hold. The ocean was alien to him, dark and turbulent and endless, offering proof of how much larger and stranger the world had become during his thousands of years of slumber. Yet as the weeks passed, she fascinated him far more than any detail of his surroundings. Her pale eyes and wavy golden hair taught him to appreciate a new kind of beauty - but it was her soul that mortared them together. Her curiosity, her sharp mind, her fearlessness added up brick by brick to build a mystery he thought he would never tire of exploring.

Later the museum became his home, and for an embarrassingly long time he thought it was her home too. In fairness, it was an easy mistake to make. Every night when the lights switched off and the crowds ebbed she was there to help him out of the glass case and guide him through the echoing halls. It shocked him when he finally learned of the other life she had apart from him, the seminars and grant applications and interminable meetings and the endless cycle of researching and writing and revising and publishing and then doing it all over again. "Do you ever sleep?" he asked, astonished.

She shrugged. "Sometimes. Lately, I find I have higher priorities." She smiled as she spoke, trailing her warm fingertips along the cool dry skin of his neck, and he leaned into her touch. Yet he couldn't ignore the shadows beneath her eyes, or how frequently she failed to stifle a yawn when she spoke. It worried him - but not enough for him to tell her to stay away and rest. He craved her company too greedily to deny it to himself for even one night.

As the months and years passed, they grew bolder. Once Nefermaat was steadier on his feet, and once Katherine felt confident that his temporary absence from the display case wouldn't be noticed, she let him lean on her as they descended the metal staircase leading to her cramped basement office. She slept then, curled up in a makeshift bedroll beneath her desk while he edited the latest chapter of her book. It was simultaneously awkward and flattering to be consulted in such depth about every mundane detail of his old life. But as he began to grasp just how much the people of the current age had forgotten or never learned, his eagerness to help her grew. His job was to ensure she recorded his words accurately. Hers was to couch his revelations in sources and evidence the academic world would find more persuasive than "my boyfriend, a dead Egyptian priest, told me this in between sessions of enthusiastic fucking." Although the doctored citations obscured the truth, they both knew he was the most important discovery she would ever make.

Often he wondered if it wouldn't be easier to come out of hiding and to tell everyone the truth, and said as much. By then they kept no secrets from each other anymore. She frowned and asked by way of reply, "Do you honestly think this world is ready? Most people I've met fear and hate what they can't explain. If they reacted poorly, if they tried to hurt you or take you from me..."

He didn't need her to finish the sentence. By now he understood his own uniqueness and the risk it posed in a culture so distrusting of the unknown. "Perhaps your book can help them accept me," he offered.

"We can only hope. I don't want you to have to hide forever."

But Katherine's worst fears never came to fruition. At last, after Nefermaat chose to stop keeping his existence a secret, home became not a prison or another tomb but a series of luxury hotels in various cities. The amenities each room offered mattered little to a being who no longer needed to eat, sleep, or eliminate, but Katherine plainly enjoyed them and he enjoyed her happiness. Her new favorite pastime was ordering elaborate meals from room service and eating them in his presence while lasciviously describing each bite he could no longer appreciate. "I'm sure my ka will benefit from the many sacrifices you offer on my behalf," he joked as she enthused about an especially delicious slice of chocolate cake. "Somehow."

She smiled as she licked the last traces of frosting from the fork, and recited in her remarkably accurate Middle Egyptian, "An offering given to the king by Osiris…"

They both knew the offering formula by heart, so he could keep teasing her while she rattled it off. "Is my ka really so starved for attention, to need all of this ceremony? Or are you just showing off your pronunciation again?"

Laughing, she tripped over a few syllables but concluded, "...for the ka of Nefermaat, priest of Anubis, insufferable pedant, who I dearly and unfortunately love."

He kissed her then - he couldn't not - but he also couldn't help wondering if anyone had ever made a true offering to his ka as something other than a joke. To his knowledge he had left no children behind in Weset, nor a long line of relatives to memorialize him. He had Katherine, of course, but it seemed unreasonable to expect her to be his only link to his new world. Ultimately, he couldn't rely on anyone but himself to preserve his own soul. So didn't he owe it to himself to take every possible opportunity to ensure he was never forgotten again?

Now that he was free, there was so much more he wanted to experience beyond the walls of their hotel rooms. But whenever he asked her to join him, she politely declined. "I need to save my energy for our lecture tomorrow," she often explained. "Besides, with my knee I'd slow you down too much." As excuses go, it was a good one; she'd used a cane on and off for as long as he'd known her, the consequence of a long-ago fall down slippery steps at a dig site, and by this time she was never without it. "But if you want to go out, don't let me stop you."

Nefermaat took her at her word. As his circle of friends expanded and his social calendar filled, people always asked him where she was. Some of them failed to conceal their disapproval - as if they expected him to go back under glass every time she turned down an invitation! - but he didn't let it bother him. He wanted his soul to be whole again, complete unto itself, not just a wandering ba flying back and forth between his tomb and the world of the living. Katherine had sustained him and carried him this far. It was his duty to bring himself the rest of the way.

* * *

Between the inquisitive retiree to one side of Katherine's house, the insomniac firefighter to the other, and the boisterous young family across the street, Nefermaat finds solitude difficult to come by. He can remain indoors with the shades drawn to reduce his chances of being disturbed, but venturing out to gather supplies without attracting attention is a challenging proposition. Fortunately, much of what he needs can be scrounged from the kitchen or workbench and repurposed. His tools from the old days would of course be ideal, but by now they are surely crumbled to dust or displayed in some museum. He will make do with what he has. The result of his work is more important than how he achieves it.

He doesn't feel at all squeamish about washing her body, cutting her open, carefully removing and cleaning each organ in preparation for embalming. This isn't the first time he's had to mummify someone he knew and cared about. In his time, many families preferred to work with a priest who had known the deceased in life, hoping a personal connection would lead to the best outcome. It's been thousands of years since he performed these tasks or recited these prayers, but his hands and lips recall each word and motion as if no time has passed at all. He works as slowly and deliberately as he dares, attending to every detail, being more exacting with himself than ever before. This will be the most important mummy he ever makes.

(Dealing with the brain is the only part that bothers him, because he knows it would have bothered her. She was always so insistent about how her science deemed it the center of all thoughts and feelings, the thing that made her _her_. She wouldn't have liked having it so unceremoniously discarded, though it still seems like a pointless affectation to him. He hasn't had a brain for several millennia now and he gets along perfectly well without one.)

The next step is trickier. Nefermaat has plenty of wine, plundered from decades-old bottles in a neglected rack in the pantry, but he isn't sure whether many of the plants and herbs he needs even exist so far to the west and so far removed from his own time. Ultimately, he decides to risk a trip to a hardware store with a garden center. He hopes the supplies he finds there are close enough. The clerks and customers are too astonished by his presence to look too closely at the contents of his cart, and likely also too ignorant to understand their function.

His judgment does not fail him. The substitutions he made prove appropriate. He stitches her back together, putting everything in its place, making certain that her body will become a fitting vessel to preserve all the elements of her soul. As for the obligatory natron, he doubts they even mine it in Egypt anymore - but the hardware store sells huge bags of salt, and the refrigerator and cabinets are surprisingly well-stocked with baking soda. Mixed together, carefully packed around and inside her, they will do the trick.

It's difficult for him to define what he feels, looking down at her in the makeshift sarcophagus he built. Pride in his own skills, of course, and sorrow at the absence of her ka - but beneath those emotions lurks something more like shame. He doesn't know why he should feel it when he's done nothing wrong. He is readying her for the trials of the Duat and for Sekhet-Aaru beyond it, a gift no one now living has ever learned to properly impart. Perhaps after forty days have passed and the next step in the process can begin, his own emotions will become clearer. All he can do now is wait to find out what happens next.

* * *

Waiting had always come easily to Nefermaat, since for so long it was all he could do. When the first shaft of light pierced his tomb and the silent air filled with low rumbles that gave way to noisy babbling, his dried heart leapt back to life in terror and anticipation. His final, confusing moments of consciousness came back to him in a rush - the barge capsizing, the waters of the Nile closing over his head, the sun glimmering high above him as he struggled fruitlessly toward the surface, the cold weight of the river filling his lungs. _I am dead and in the underworld,_ he thought, and marveled at the realization. He had spent his whole life wondering what death would be like. Now he would finally know.

He tried to look toward the light, but he couldn't move his head. The Book of the Dead he had so carefully memorized rushed immediately into his thoughts, but when he began to speak the first essential spells his lips remained sealed. What was happening? Had the priests entrusted with his mummy failed to open his mouth? This was not what he expected from the Duat.

Abruptly a face filled his vision. _A judge? A god?_ No, a young woman - pale and golden-haired and alien yet strikingly beautiful, gazing down on him with intent fascination. She glanced behind her and shouted something incomprehensible. His heart beat faster. The muscles of his face, as frozen as the rest of him, did not betray the sudden wonder he felt. So thoroughly did she stir his imagination that it didn't even distress him when he felt his still-immobile form being lifted and carried out of the tomb to rest in another lightless place. He could not prevent whatever these people planned to do to him, but perhaps she would be there with him when it happened.

Time raged like a sandstorm around him. Cut off from the sun, he could not track its passing. His awareness was fully intact, but his body stubbornly refused to budge no matter how desperately he willed it to. All he could do was lie in the dark and listen to the sounds around him. The steady, gentle rocking of his sarcophagus told him he was on a boat. By the persistence of the motion he could tell its journey was a long one. This, more than anything, proved he was not in the underworld. Only a pharaoh deserved such an honorable passage into rebirth. Despondency weighed him down until his innate curiosity won out. If this was not the afterlife, what was it? Why had he come here? And who was the woman who had awakened him?

Whoever she was, she rarely left his side during her waking hours. He couldn't turn his head enough to see her, but he could hear her soft breathing, her low tuneless humming, the scratch of her pen on paper - and her conversations. Her voice was easy to distinguish from those of the many men who constantly came and went from the ship's hold to speak with her in their foreign language. Yet with nothing to do but listen and think, little by little he found himself understanding their speech, piecing together vocabulary and structure. One of the first words he could reliably distinguish was her name: _Katherine_.

One day Nefermaat's own name jumped out at him from the morass of garbled syllables, the vowels stretched and flattened in the speakers' bizarre accents. He listened more closely, straining to decipher the words, and learned they had been talking about him all the while. Katherine and the men accompanying her had come from far away to plunder his tomb. Now they were taking him home with them. _Archaeologists,_ they called themselves. They did not know he was conscious, and spoke about him as if he were an object to be studied. If this was truly meant to be his journey through the underworld, it was a slow and maddening one indeed - especially because, as he soon discovered, most of what they believed about him was completely wrong.

The more he understood of the archaeologists' language, the more torturous his existence became. They lacked the most basic comprehension of symbolism, of cosmology, of ritual. Children knew better than they did. They read hieroglyphics, more or less, but recurrently glossed over the richness and nuance of the text. He gathered from their conversations that some of the texts and images they were studying had been damaged or otherwise rendered incomplete, but any reasoning adult should have been able to fill in the blanks. Their extrapolations about his life were wildly incorrect, often laughably so. Katherine's interpretations came closest to the truth, yet the others dismissed her theories all too often. His frustration was becoming unbearable. Had some capricious god designed this torment especially for him, as punishment for some forgotten sin? Or was this simply the way through the Duat for everyone?

He finally lost his patience at the end of a long discussion between Katherine and a man she called "Professor." Professor commanded respect with the others owing to his seniority, yet reliably came to the most inane conclusions out of all the archaeologists. Nefermaat wished he would fall overboard. They were debating the meaning of a line from a prayer (which would have been obvious if they had been pronouncing it correctly), both unwilling to concede to the other's interpretation. "Let this go, Katherine," Professor was saying. "Decades of established Egyptology stand against you. Innovation is important, but you'll never earn tenure by chipping away at your own foundation." Nefermaat didn't know what "tenure" was, but Professor's meaning was clear: _Submit to me as your better if you want my respect._

"I'm well aware of what established Egyptology says," replied Katherine, "but the carvings on the sarcophagus and the calligraphy on the bandages include texts we've never seen before. I've found nothing but support for my hypothesis. When we get back to New York and we can take Nefermaat's mummy out for a better look, who can say what we'll learn?"

"Who, indeed." Nefermaat felt the Professor's fingertips brush against the wooden identification tag tied around his neck. His heavy footsteps echoed through the hold as he walked away. "We'll continue then. I look forward to hearing what 'Maat is beautiful' has to say for himself."

Hearing his own name mistranslated was too much. He hadn't meant to speak aloud, but somehow his jaw creaked open and the correction spilled out. "With perfect justice," he croaked in Katherine and Professor's language.

For a moment, everything was silent. Just when Nefermaat was beginning to wonder if he hadn't pronounced the words accurately enough to make himself understood, Professor demanded, "What did you say?"

"Nothing," said Katherine, sounding confused.

"I must be hearing things," Professor muttered as he departed. "I've spent too long at sea."

A new and welcome sight suddenly broke the uninterrupted vista of wooden ceiling beams Nefermaat had watched for so long. Katherine's face, filled with uncertainty, looked down at him. "Is someone there?" she called. Her voice filled the room, but her gaze never left him - as if she already knew (or perhaps feared) the answer.

"Yes," said Nefermaat.

She choked back a shriek and jerked backward, disappearing from view. Had he frightened her away? He wasn't sure he could fault her for fleeing - but she didn't. Instead she returned, her eyes wide with astonishment. "Are you alive?" she demanded, her lower lip trembling slightly.

He wasn't sure how to answer. "Maybe."

A thousand questions went to war in her expression. The one that prevailed was, "You're speaking English. How?"

"I have been listening to you." Undisguised horror flooded her face as she thought back through everything she'd unwittingly said in front of him. He hastened to add, "Do not be ashamed. You understand much more than any of the others."

"I'm flattered you think so. Most people wouldn't agree with you."

"Would you like me to tell them they are wrong?" She laughed, and in an instant he knew he would do anything to hear that sound again. "You do not fear me," he mused - an observation he hadn't meant to speak aloud.

Katherine's eyes widened. "Are you kidding? I'm terrified. And wondering if I'm losing my mind."

Nefermaat thought he grasped the meaning of the idiom. "If you are, so am I."

"Terrified? Or losing your mind?"

"Yes."

She laughed again, though he hadn't been trying to make a joke. "Well, at least I'm not alone. And yes, I'm scared and confused - but I'm curious, too. I wanted to learn about you. I just didn't expect to learn...this."

"I am also curious about you."

"Well, I'm afraid you'll find I'm not very interesting."

"Then you will find the same is true about me. In life I was no one of consequence, yet you came all this way to find me. What a terrible waste."

"I see your point," she said, sounding newly pensive. "I _know_ you have so much to teach me. Maybe there are things I can teach you, too."

"I would like that very much." He was struck with an overwhelming urge to find out how her name felt in his mouth. "Katherine."

"Dr. Bishop," she corrected him, so quickly it seemed reflexive.

"Dr. Bishop," Nefermaat repeated. He had no idea what she meant to convey by the change of title, but he was no stranger to the importance of addressing people (and gods) correctly. He wanted nothing more than to discover all the names by which she could be known, public and hidden and secret even to herself, and to speak them all in reverence until no part of her being was foreign to him.

Wood scraped against wood as she pulled up her chair beside his sarcophagus. He couldn't see her face anymore, but when she spoke, her voice was calm and even. It amazed him how quickly she had accepted her new reality. "Then can I ask you some questions?"

"Of course."

"Before, when you spoke to Professor Watts and me...What did you mean?"

He was so caught up in the excitement of finally conversing with her that it took him a moment to remember what she was referencing. "Professor does not understand my name. It means 'with perfect justice.' It is important to call people what they truly are."

"I agree. So tell me...what are you? Truly?"

"I do not know anymore."

"Intriguing," she murmured. "Shall we figure it out together?"

His reanimated heart thumped wildly in his chest. "Yes."

* * *

When all the messy remnants of life have dried up and been swept away, all that remains is to become divine. Nefermaat is relieved to have gotten past the most gruesome initial stages without interruption. It means his assistants back in the city are resolutely continuing to hold all his calls, the bribe to the funeral director was sufficient, and the neighbors have no reason yet to suspect what he is doing. He's more than halfway finished with his work now. While the next steps are challenging enough in their way, he's progressed to a point where he is reasonably confident of success.

He brushes away the natron and bathes her again in oil and wine, ensuring her limbs remain supple and unbroken, blessing her and preparing her for the next steps. Linen was easy to come by at the craft store in the shopping center down the road, even in the vast quantities he needed. The clerk gave him an odd look when he bought it, and he wonders if she suspects what he's doing. If she does, it didn't bother her enough to stop her from making the sale. He uses Katherine's fabric scissors to cut the cloth into strips and creates the necessary protective amulets out of old costume jewelry he salvages from a box in her closet. It's not how his mentors taught him to do things, and he's aware he's cutting some corners, but it's a fitting enough method of achieving his goals.

He wraps her with as much care as he would a pharaoh, starting at her head and working downward, constantly smoothing the bandages as he works, slowly continuing past her torso to each limb until he can delicately wind up each finger and toe. Clouds of incense billow through the air, filling the basement, making his head spin. Often he pauses to recite a necessary prayer or incorporate an amulet into the wrappings. Despite thousands of years of idleness, he still remembers each incantation as clearly as if he had spoken it yesterday - yet he finds himself inordinately tempted to make deliberate mistakes.

Nefermaat has had a long time to think about what might have happened to bring him here. The best explanation he can come up with is that whoever mummified him got it wrong. His body is intact, and his ba and ka seem more or less united, yet he remains shut out of the Duat and stubbornly cut off from the cycles of rebirth. The error is impressive in its uniqueness; as far as he knows, his fate has never befallen anyone else. He contemplates the long stretch of lonely centuries ahead of him, and wonders if anyone could blame him for wanting to fill them with the companionship of another person who could understand exactly what he'd been through.

In the end, he can't bring himself to do it. His curse is his and his alone. He refuses to pass it along to another being as undeserving of it as he is. No matter what it costs him, he will guide her to the afterlife she deserves, even if it means he will be alone. He knows all too well the dangers of departing from the words you planned to speak.

* * *

Beneath the insistent white glow of the studio lights, the talk show host perspired uncontrollably. Up close, his caked-on makeup made him look stiff and grotesque, like a crudely embalmed mummy. Supposedly, he would look better on film. The heat of the stage didn't bother Nefermaat; if anything, it reminded him of the desert he'd left far behind. He sat motionless on the sofa beside the desk, an untouched mug of coffee at his elbow, and waited for his moment to arrive.

At the edge of the stage, a woman in black held up one hand. "You're on in five, four…" A neon sign calling for applause buzzed on above his head. Somewhere beyond the blinding glare in front of him, an unseen studio audience obeyed. He stared into the flat black maw of the camera lens as the host introduced him while simultaneously insisting that he required no introduction.

The host turned to face him with a gleaming grin. "So, Nefermaat, I think I speak for all of us when I say the first question on our minds is: Why pyramids?"

"They were built thousands of years before I was born," he replied. "In the Old Kingdom. I lived during the Eighteenth Dynasty. Unfortunately, I couldn't say why they did the things they did. And before you ask, Cleopatra was born a thousand years after me. I never met her either."

The host's smile didn't budge, but it no longer reached his eyes. _Oh,_ thought Nefermaat, _I forgot these people aren't like Katherine. They're interested in a tidy story, not the truth._ He quickly added, "But I can tell you aliens did it if you'd like."

That got a laugh from the audience. Almost imperceptibly, the host relaxed. He propped up a hardcover book at the edge of his desk, with Nefermaat's face prominently displayed on the cover. In the photograph he was gazing into the distance with a blank expression that his editor thought looked wise and mysterious. "Well, I don't recall any aliens in your new book, but in it you have a lot to say about other topics, don't you?"

Nefermaat's publicist had coached him on how to answer this one. For the most part he stuck to the script, hitting all the main points in the marketing plan to pique the audience's interest. Since it was already a bestseller he didn't have to push it too hard, which emboldened him to go off-script. "I am glad people find the stories of my life so fascinating. I owe it all to Dr. Bishop. Without her, I would not be here today."

"Of course. Katherine Bishop is the one who discovered you, right?"

He was never sure how to feel about people who used the word "discovered" to describe him, as if he hadn't already been there from the start. "She brought me here, yes."

"Sure, sure. From the first time the world saw you it's been clear the two of you have a special bond." Up in the booth they were probably cutting to the footage from when Nefermaat got up, a clip he had seen so many times he knew it forward and backward. It made his memories of that day warped and confused, as if he were watching his ba going forth from the tomb of his own perceptions. The host leaned in conspiratorially and winked. "Forgive me for being forward, but inquiring minds have to know. So, just between you and me and our million or so closest friends...Did you and Katherine ever…?"

Nefermaat had an answer for this, too. "It's true, Dr. Bishop taught me many things about the way the world works now. And one of her most important lessons was that a gentleman never kisses and tells."

Laughter and applause rippled through the audience. He knew they didn't want the whole truth. No one ever did. They only wanted hints and suggestions, a new collection of excuses to reinforce the stories they had already decided to tell themselves. The host leaned back, basking in their satisfaction as if he had anything to do with it. "Don't touch that dial," he called out over the din. "We'll be right back with more from Nefermaat after a word from our sponsors."

The cameras cut away. The noise of the crowd faded. A small army of makeup artists swooped in to touch up the host's shiny face. One of them took a tentative step toward Nefermaat, but he waved her away. A man with a nebulous role - some variety of producer, perhaps? - replaced her. "Word of advice," he said without preamble as he adjusted his tie and checked his expensive watch. "The Katherine Bishop angle isn't a winner with our target demographic."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Look, we get it. She meant a lot to you. Got you where you are today. Literally. But that's all in the past now. Your agent told us your solo book is putting up better numbers than any of the ones with her name on them. The people don't want dry academic crap. They want glamour. Mystery. Excitement. They want _you_. So why don't you quit dragging her around with you? She's just gonna hold you back."

The man vanished into the wings without waiting for a response. Nefermaat didn't know what to say to him anyway. It hadn't occurred to him until now to question why Katherine hadn't been asked to appear. He had assumed it was a practical accommodation; these days she disliked late nights and politely declined most evening speaking engagements. Nor had he ever considered that other people might not find her as fascinating as he did. He was so accustomed to thinking of her as exotic and himself as mundane that it jarred him to realize that for everyone else, it was the opposite.

The commercial break was ending. The host idly shuffled the papers on his desk, preparing to resume the interview. Nefermaat knew no one in this room could force him to be the man they wanted him to be. He could refuse to play along and end his flirtation with celebrity as abruptly as he had begun it - and go back to letting others speak for him, an option that held little appeal. He may not have been able to control being brought into this world, but it had certainly been his choice to embrace it. It was too late to turn back now, even if it meant leaving Katherine behind.

Nefermaat faced the stage lights without blinking. This time, when the questioning resumed, he told everyone exactly what they wanted to hear.

* * *

The longer the mummification process goes on, the more Nefermaat misses the way things used to be. He should have the company of scribes to help him write the funeral papyri, artisans to paint the walls and carve shabtis and scarabs, laborers to lay in a store of provisions for the underworld, a small army of assistant priests to recite the prayers and complete the rituals. In their absence, he has to do it all himself. He's never been more grateful not to need sleep anymore. Despite his best efforts, his craftsmanship is appallingly crude by the standards of the people who trained their whole lives to perform the tasks he's fumbling through. In fact, his entire approach is arguably irregular by its nature. All the same, he is confident the gods will still find it acceptable. It's the best he can do given the circumstances.

Sculpting a suitable funeral mask is so far beyond his skill that he doesn't even bother to attempt it. The long-unused patchwork quilt from Katherine's bed will have to serve as her shroud. She deserves so much more than this - but fortunately, the trappings of the tomb aren't what will make her immortal. Such a feat requires his will and his magic, not any particular physical object.

Even so, the lack of the correct adze to open her mouth frustrates him profoundly. It's probably tucked away in a crate in her museum somewhere, but he's pushed his luck too much already to feel comfortable going back for it. The elderly woman next door has seen him coming and going too often. It's only a matter of time before she lets too much slip to someone else who starts putting pieces together. If he's interrupted now, Katherine will spend eternity without light or sustenance, a fate arguably worse than the one he is trying to save her from. So in the interest of efficiency and safety, an X-Acto Knife from the workbench will have to do the job.

Nefermaat touches the blade to her eyes, to her lips, to her arms and legs. Words he memorized millennia ago spill easily from his tongue, every syllable as clear and powerful now as it was in Weset. But partway into the meat offerings his gaze inadvertently falls upon the pile of document boxes in the corner of the room, and a stray thought nearly stops him in his tracks. He doesn't let it prevent him from finishing the ritual, lest all his efforts be wasted. But as soon as he has completed the last closing rites and he knows she is ready for her last journey, he sinks down to the cold cellar floor with his back against the table on which she lies and follows the terrible thought to where it leads him.

He needed to move everything off the shelves in order to paint the necessary spells on the walls, including the boxes of Katherine's old research notes. Now they sit in a tilted stack in front of the washer, as mysterious and inviting as a pyramid. He doesn't really know what's inside them. He's never really needed to look at anything but her final drafts, although the clutter in her office had always made it obvious that her studies generated a vast amount of material apart from her completed manuscripts. Now he's run out of excuses not to see the rest of how she spent her life in the years before they met.

Nefermaat lifts the lid of the first box. Did the stone of his sarcophagus feel so heavy to her when she pushed it aside? The notebooks and documents inside have gone yellow and brittle around the edges, but her neat looping handwriting is still perfectly legible on every page. They're full of notes she made on dozens of primary sources, bibliographies, photographic negatives, drafts of thesis chapters, travel permits and plans for expeditions. It is her own Book of Coming Forth by Day, a carefully prepared text meant to guide her through a world she had never visited but hoped to see someday. Discovering him had been a staggering amount of work - and once she had achieved it, everything she had done to reach him was rendered pointless.

Despite her monumental efforts, it was impossible to get everything right. In the end, her work was speculation - well-informed and often mostly accurate, but speculation nonetheless. It had only been sustainable because there was no better way to understand the past. But now, with Nefermaat around, spending years to make an educated guess about history was no longer relevant when you could simply ask someone who had been there to experience it. Where once the books written about him bore Katherine's name alone, and then listed both of them as equal collaborators, Nefermaat is now the sole author. The readers don't understand that she built his foundation, stone by stone, year by year, sacrifice by sacrifice. Yet by choosing to live his life again, to tell his own story, he has rendered hers unnecessary.

"I didn't mean it," he says softly, but the words echo hollowly off the concrete walls and floors of the basement. Some selfish part of him hopes she'll answer back to absolve him, to reassure him and to lighten his heart, but she remains stubbornly silent. A long time passes before he gets up again.

* * *

A finger rapped heavily and insistently against the display case, filling Nefermaat's ears with a dull persistent thumping and his heart with a sort of irritated resignation. "Don't touch the glass," someone barked, which was exactly what the signs all around his exhibit said, which all the sticky fingerprints proved no one ever read. _If any of these people tap on my case again I'm going to do it,_ he told himself. _I'll get up. Today could be the day._

"He's so gross," a child's voice announced, which offended Nefermaat on behalf of the priests who had embalmed him so skillfully. Nothing about his current unforeseeable situation was their fault. After he drowned, his apprentices had used everything he'd taught them to mummify him as beautifully as they would any pharaoh. No one understood how much their efforts meant to him, except for Katherine.

"That's what they did for their kings back then, kiddo," another, adult voice said. "Take it all in. You're not gonna see this back in Iowa."

"Wow, Dad," said the child. "He was a king?"

"I guess so," said the child's father, who would have known he was wrong if he had bothered to read the section label on the wall across from him. _I was a priest. Get it right. It's not difficult._ The man's ignorance was even more annoying than any tiny, grubby finger smudging the glass.

Ignoring all of Katherine's advice and warnings, Nefermaat risked opening his eyes. Luckily, the child and its parents had turned their backs on him, which gave him more time to stare at the ceiling and try to talk himself out of what he was about to do. How long had he spent here? A decade? Two? How much longer did he intend to lie like this, pretending he was dead, listening passively while visitors proclaimed the most ridiculous falsehoods about him? It was too much - and a waste of time he could be spending with Katherine. He'd had enough of the museum. He was tired of pretending he wanted anything but to be with her.

The glass covering his sarcophagus only looked like a sealed, impenetrable box. In reality, Katherine had long ago chiseled away the caulk holding the seams together, allowing him to emerge from the display case by night. The panes scraped together loudly as he pushed the cover aside. Sitting up, he noticed the insolent child watching with wide eyes and an open mouth. The child turned to tug urgently on a woman's skirts as Nefermaat climbed unsteadily out of the sarcophagus. "Mom," said the child. "Mom."

The mother was engrossed in an exhibit of gold jewelry looted from some other unfortunate tomb. "Hmm?"

"The mummy's walking around."

She chuckled. "You have such a big imagination, honey."

Nefermaat didn't wait around to learn how this minor drama would play out. Slowly, deliberately, he shuffled away without looking back. The high-pitched shriek resounding through the gallery behind him gave him a good indication of its conclusion.

Almost immediately he realized he hadn't thought very hard about exactly what he would do after he got up. He was heading in the general direction of Katherine's office, but with no guarantee she would be in it. He'd never possessed a very complete understanding of how she spent her time when she wasn't with him. By day the museum was bustling and brightly lit, no longer a tomb but a marketplace - so different that it felt like an entirely new building. He made no effort at stealth as he shambled through the corridors, and the people who saw him reacted more or less the way he'd imagined they would - running and screaming, staring slack-jawed, cowering and cringing, lifting cameras and camcorders to their astonished faces. _Let them think what they want of me,_ he resolved. _I'm not doing this for any of them._

The vaulted central hallway was newly hung with colorful banners emblazoned with the number "100," which helped him fit together a few missing pieces. A week or two earlier, Katherine had mentioned something about an upcoming celebration to mark the museum's first century of existence. It seemed to him like a ridiculously brief amount of time to commemorate, like throwing a birthday party for a five-minute-old infant, but she and her colleagues clearly viewed the occasion with great importance and ceremony.

The crowds were thickest on the front steps leading up to the building. Nefermaat had never been outside the museum's stone walls since the day he had first been brought inside. His heart stuttered at the thought of what he might find beyond them, but it was too late to turn back now. He did not hesitate to push the doors open and stepped out into the grey light of a chilly autumn afternoon.

Katherine was there, of course. She leaned heavily on her cane, and her fair hair was shot through with thick veins of silver. Fine lines mapped river deltas around her mouth and eyes. Her beauty had been different on the boat, so long ago. She stood behind a podium and faced a wall of cameras and microphones which had all just shifted their focus to him. A murmur (shot through with the occasional piercing cry of terror) ran through the crowd. Now he remembered something else she'd told him, a new title she had recently earned: "Senior Curator of Egyptology." Of course these reporters would want to speak to her about the collection she worked so hard to build. He hadn't meant to interrupt them, but the damage was already done.

He crossed the few remaining feet between them and embraced her. In spite of everything he had done, she smiled as he approached and melted into his touch as his arms encircled her. Chaos had begun to swirl around them, but he decided not to care about it, at least for now. "Are you cursed?" she murmured with her face pressed against his chest, but he didn't know how to respond. It wasn't until much later that he began to understand what she might have meant.

* * *

Nefermaat nails the front door to Katherine's house shut on his way out. He has done everything he can to prepare her to travel through the Duat. She has provisions for the journey, a body and a tomb to carry her to the underworld, all the necessary books of spells to protect her from danger and teach her all the right words to say. When she addresses the forty-two judges and makes her negative confession, they will find her every bit as pure and faultless as he did. When her heart is weighed, he knows it will be lighter than a feather. She will pass at last into the peace of Sekhet-Aaru to be born again, eternally, without end.

At least, that's what he tells himself.

On the house's covered front porch, adorned with wicker chairs and a few withered potted plants, anyone who wishes may make offerings to her ka. He isn't sure if anyone will, since he doubts it will be safe for him to return again. Someday soon the monolith of lies and omissions he has constructed will begin to crumble, and when it does he fully expects someone to breach the sealed inner tomb. When it happens, he will do well to be far away from this place. There's probably a law against what he has done, though the potential consequences don't worry him too much. He doubts anyone can kill or imprison him in a way that would truly matter.

He left most of his materials inside the tomb when he finished, but he held on to a paintbrush and a small can of black paint, which he opens. Hieroglyphics flow freely from his brush, reproducing the familiar offering formula on the weathered green wood of the front door. _An offering given by the king to Osiris, Lord of the West, Lord of Eternity, that he may give an invocation offering of bread, beer, oxen, birds, alabaster, clothing, and every good and pure thing upon which a god lives, for the ka of Dr. Katherine Bishop, Senior Curator of Egyptology, True of Voice._

Nefermaat steps away from the door and leans heavily against the porch railing. It's finally over. She will live on without him, in a paradise he is no longer sure he is promised, and he will continue alone in the world he chose to join. His curse is to know that, from the moment he first opened his eyes, there was never another possible outcome. His curse is never knowing whether he did all of this for her, or for himself.

* * *

The rocking of the ship as it made its way across the black ocean often lulled Katherine to sleep in his arms, but not tonight. She had too many questions. "Before you tell me I'm being ridiculous, I'll remind you that unlike some people I know about the dynasties and that Thebes and Giza are different places and I understand you're not from the Old Kingdom, okay? But I have to ask. What do you know about the pyramids that we don't?"

Nefermaat smiled and kissed the top of her head. He still lacked control over most of his body, but at least he could turn his neck and move one arm to make enough space for her to lie beside him when she wanted to. "It depends on what you've learned about them already."

"Well, they were tombs for pharaohs, obviously. People have taken out a lot of the grave goods from inside them. Sorry," she added when she saw him cringe. "Not my call. The real debate is about how you built them."

"The pharaoh paid a lot of people to stack a lot of bricks? I don't know. I'm a priest. I make mummies and someone else builds the tombs."

"Oh. Good point. Well, I had to try," she said, and laughed softly at herself.

He hated the disappointment he heard in her words, and tried to give her what she wanted. "But I think anyone who builds anything does it to be remembered. They want their descendants to see what they made, and look closer, and know them as they would have wanted to be known."

"People now are still the same. We just go about it a different way."

"What do you mean? How would you go about it?"

"You really aren't afraid of personal questions, are you?"

"No. Why would I be?"

"It's okay. I don't mind." She reached over to gently squeeze the hand he couldn't move where it lay folded across his chest, a touch made somehow more thrilling by his inability to respond to it. "If that's what you think a pyramid is, my pyramid is my work. My books, my excavations, my exhibits at the museum. I hope I can use it all to understand something no one's ever understood before. And when I'm gone, I hope somebody takes what I've done and continues it."

"I will help you." He couldn't think of anything he wouldn't do for her, his savior, his discoverer, the only thing that made sense in the nonsensical world he had been thrown into. "I love you."

"I love you, too," she said. Then, more softly and in his language instead of hers, so close he could feel her breath on his ear: "I trust you with my heart."

 _Does she know what she is giving me?_ he wondered, but of course she did. A fragment of a spell drifted through his thoughts: _O my heart which I had upon earth, do not rise up against me as a witness in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance..._ He wanted nothing more than to be worthy of her trust. He feared he would never be.

He couldn't forget the Book of the Dead, or the confession he had copied so many times for so many of the hopeful dead. All of them waiting their turn before the scales of Maat, praying they could honestly speak the familiar words: _Behold I have come to you, I have brought you truth, I have repelled falsehood for you...I have done no evil, I have not caused pain, I have not made to weep, I have not caused anyone's suffering, I am pure._ How could he, or anyone, make such a proclamation when the path he had once seen so clearly before him had vanished?

Nefermaat didn't know what was wrong or right anymore. All he knew was his own heart. "And I trust you with mine, Katherine," he said, but even as he kissed her he wasn't sure if he was offering her a promise or a curse.


End file.
